


Invisible Stitches

by Lynse



Category: Danny Phantom
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Family Bonding, Family Fluff, Gen, One Shot, Only a tiny bit of angst, post-reveal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-13
Updated: 2021-03-13
Packaged: 2021-03-20 17:40:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,869
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30008529
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lynse/pseuds/Lynse
Summary: Family bonding time might be less dangerous now that his parents know his secret, but that doesn’t mean Danny is wild about being kept in the dark when it comes to his dad’s plans for the weekend.
Relationships: Danny Fenton & Jack Fenton
Comments: 31
Kudos: 176





	Invisible Stitches

**Author's Note:**

  * For [interstellarstrut](https://archiveofourown.org/users/interstellarstrut/gifts).



> For the lovely interstellarstrut.

“You all packed for our trip, Danny-boy?”

Danny phased his pillow over his head and groaned into it. His father was entirely too cheerful and enthusiastic for six in the morning.

On the upside, he was packed. Jazz had done it for him last night while he’d been out fighting Technus with Tucker and Maddie; he’d seen her put it in the GAV once they got back. He still needed to thank her for that; Maddie had still been interrogating him when he’d seen Jazz, and he’d been too busy trying not to put his foot in his mouth. Some of Maddie’s questions were about Technus, but others were obviously designed to help him realize what she considered to be flaws in his fighting style.

Since his parents had found out the truth, they weren’t exactly happy about the fact that their kids (because Sam and Tucker were part of the family as far as they were concerned) had done so much fighting by themselves, under the noses of the adults, and were trying to take steps to rectify that. Still, at this point, they were learning as much (if not more) from Danny and his friends as they were teaching.

Danny had not told them about Valerie yet, mostly because he hadn’t had this conversation with Valerie herself. He’d called a tentative truce with her, too—easier once his parents had publicly called one with Phantom—but he hadn’t told her everything, despite thinking she’d take it better now than she would have in the past. Plus, even if he did have Val’s permission to tell his parents her secret, he was pretty sure they’d be even _less_ enthusiastic when they found out one of the best ghost hunters in town was his classmate, not a tech-savvy young adult who was following in their inventive footsteps.

“I can make you some Fenton Toast for breakfast!”

“Thanks, Dad,” Danny mumbled into his pillow. Jack would pour him a bowl of cereal. He always did. He’d finally accepted that Danny wouldn’t eat Fenton Toast (or any toast), but he’d latched onto it as something easy with which to tease him.

Easy and safe.

Danny appreciated the gesture for what it was, which was the real reason he dragged himself out of bed. At least his dad had agreed to leave later than four in the morning. He’d wanted to do another fishing trip for ages, so Danny had finally agreed, on the condition that it was somewhere closer than Lake Eerie. He wasn’t sure which spot his dad had picked out, but—

Danny blinked, noticing the bright numbers on his digital clock, and blinked again, expecting them to change.

It was nine in the morning, not six in the morning.

A fact supported by the amount of light coming in his window.

Confusion spurred Danny into action, and he dressed quickly and took the stairs two at a time. (He could have phased through the floor and flown to the kitchen, true, but matters weren’t quite _that_ urgent, and he was still getting his parents used to the little things.) There was a bowl of cereal waiting for him on the kitchen table, and Jack had pulled out some needlepoint, evidently deciding to use that to pass the time. He quickly shoved it into a pocket as Danny entered, smiling eagerly at him.

Danny slid into the chair at the table almost automatically, grabbing a spoonful of cereal as he said, “It’s nine.”

“Thought you deserved to sleep in a bit,” Jack said brightly. “You need your rest!”

“To fish? Isn’t the whole point of that _to_ rest?”

Jack hesitated.

“Thanks,” Danny said, deciding to let his dad off the hook. He shouldn’t be surprised that fishing apparently wasn’t the only thing Jack had planned for the weekend. Danny started to eat his cereal, waiting for Jack to tell him what the plan was.

He didn’t.

Danny wasn’t convinced that was because Maddie had walked into the kitchen and started talking to him. When Jack wanted to say something, he found a way to work it into the conversation, however unrelated the topic. There had been opportunities, and he hadn’t taken them.

“Where are we going?” Danny asked ten minutes later when he was safely buckled into the GAV and they were speeding through the streets of Amity Park. (Every time Danny thought there might be a close call, he turned _most_ of the vehicle intangible. Just not the tires, since he didn’t want the entire thing to sink into the road, which would bring up entirely too many questions from the inevitable witnesses. Besides, Jack was good about correcting his course before the tires were due to hit something. Danny hadn’t needed to make a tough decision yet.)

“Out of town!” Jack chirped, as if that weren’t blatantly obvious.

Danny kept asking questions, and he kept getting vague answers in response. The more detailed the answers were, the less relevant they became. As time ticked by, it became painfully obvious that his dad was avoiding the subject.

Truthfully, one of the reasons Danny didn’t bolt was that he was sure Jazz must know what was up, and she’d have never let him come if she thought there was some danger. Danny hated that he still had these thoughts, even when it had been months, but it was hard to break habits that had kept him alive—or at least whole—for so long. He let Jack fill the silence, rattling off stories that hardly seemed connected until five stories in when the topic circled back to the first one before bleeding into something else entirely. Danny contented himself with making the appropriate listening noises, more intent on convincing himself that this wasn’t a trap than actually listening to anything Jack was saying.

When his dad finally turned off the highway, hours into the trip, it was onto a gravel road Danny didn’t recognize. “Where _exactly_ are we going?” he tried, hoping the slight change in wording would make a difference when it came to getting a real answer.

Futilely hoping the slight change in wording would make a difference when it came to getting a real answer, that is.

Still, it wasn’t long before the road dipped towards a creek, and Jack pulled the GAV to the side of the road before it could rise again and announced that this was a good place to stop. Danny was just as baffled as before. “We’re stopping for lunch?” he guessed, since it was almost one now, and breakfast seemed like it had been a long time ago. He glanced out the window again, sincerely doubted there were any fish bigger than minnows in that water, and desperately tried to remember if there were any restrictions on where you could fish that his dad might have forgotten. Unless forgetting was the problem. “Did you not get the fishing licenses?” He hoped the truth was something so simple.

“I thought of something better to do than fishing!”

Danny’s smile froze on his face. It was all too easy to remember the number of times one of Jack’s good ideas had blown up in Danny’s face—often literally.

“Lunch first,” Jack admitted, reaching around to grab a picnic hamper from behind Danny’s seat. Evidently, the cooler was for later. Supper, maybe, if they weren’t fishing after all. “Mads even packed us some fudge and cookies as a treat!”

Lunch was simple—various sandwiches with assorted fruits and veg that travelled well, like carrot sticks and oranges, plus a couple of thermoses of lemonade to go along with what turned out to be an entire second hamper of treats—and Danny put _later_ out of his mind, figuring he’d deal with it whenever he found out what it was. Logically, he knew his parents couldn’t have planned something particularly nefarious. Or, more to the point, they’d have tried earlier if they were going to try anything at all, and Jazz was good at asking the right questions to find out what she needed in order to protect him. If this came back to bite him—which also sometimes happened quite literally—it would be out of an honest mistake, not a brilliantly executed master plan.

Besides, this was kinda nice. The uncut grass caught beneath the red-checkered Fenton Blanket made for some extra cushioning, and they weren’t immediately swarmed by mosquitoes or ants or other insects despite the picnic. The sun was warm, and the silence between them was comfortable, complemented rather than accentuated by the quiet tricking of the creek.

For once in a very long while, Danny thought he might even be able to let his guard down. At least, if there were any ghosts around, they weren’t near enough for him to pick up with his ghost sense. He could be thankful for small mercies.

“Are we far enough away?” Jack asked in between bites of fudge, shooting Danny a glance.

“Far enough away from what?”

“Everything. The portal. Ghosts.”

Danny frowned, not managing to squash the rising feeling of guilt as the truth became clear to him. “Is…is that why you drove nearly four hours to get to the middle of nowhere?” How could the thought that his parents might be trying to separate him from Jazz and Sam and Tucker before making their move have crossed his mind? It had never been fully formed, but it had been there, welling up with every wave of uneasiness he’d had since this trip had begun, however much he’d tried to convince himself otherwise.

After all, now that his parents knew his secret, knew how much Jazz had covered for him, they could have tried to play her as easily as him, and—

He was doing it again.

No.

_Listen_.

“—aren’t any cemeteries around here,” Jack was saying as he shifted so that he was facing Danny rather than the creek ahead of them. “Mads checked. I thought we could do another trip to the desert since you didn’t want to head up to Eerie, but Jazzy-pants said there was a ghost there last time, too.”

“You guys checked?” Danny repeated. That couldn’t have been easy. Were cemeteries even marked on maps? He had no idea. It had never occurred to him to look.

“You’ve been under a lot of stress,” Jack said as he picked up one of Maddie’s cookies, “and you can’t enjoy yourself if you’re constantly having to battle ghosts.” He hesitated. “I know that’s an understatement, Danno. We both do. Giving you a vacation that isn’t centred around ghosts or target practice or something like that is the best we could think of doing.”

They’d been trying to give him a vacation from ghost hunting? From target practice? From not only being Phantom but all the little things that had sprung up since his parents had found out? All the questions, all the weapons testing, all the training?

“But…but we can’t exactly set up camp here.” Legalities aside, they were parked on the shoulder of the road, and it wasn’t far from the grassy ditch to the muddy bank. There was room for a picnic blanket mostly because this road seemed so deserted that no one was going to drive by and cover them in dust, since they were maybe a foot from the edge of the gravel at most.

“We aren’t. There’s a campground about an hour from here, little place, no ghost stories coming out of it that we can find. Supposed to be a good place to watch the stars. I…I thought you might want to remind me of some of the constellations. Help me when I can’t quite remember their names or can’t seem to find them.”

It wasn’t something they’d done for years. It was too bright to see the stars well in Amity Park, and heading out to the country on a special trip wasn’t something there had often been time for. Most of Danny’s stargazing sessions had been as Phantom, when he could fly away from the light pollution and just _enjoy_ seeing everything that he couldn’t spot in town. They still went to the park sometimes—the one on the west side of town was the best for that, the darkest—but it wasn’t the same. It wasn’t far enough away from the light to see everything that Danny knew was up there.

Danny’s mouth was dry. He took another sip of his lemonade, warm now and sweeter for it, though there was still a sour tang on his tongue. “I’d love that.”

“I miss spending time with you.” Jack’s admission was surprisingly quiet for someone who was usually so loud. “We drifted apart as you grew up, all of us, even more so since…. A weekend here and there with you and Jazz isn’t enough. It just reminds me what I’m missing, and I don’t want to miss the things I shouldn’t miss.”

He pulled something from his pocket. Danny half-expected it to be a weapon, maybe a prototype he’d been working on, since getting Danny’s advice on his designs and their effectiveness against ghosts—to capture, subdue, or incapacitate as opposed to completely obliterate—had become commonplace. Instead, it was the needlepoint he’d been working on earlier. “I’m still finishing the border,” Jack confessed as he turned it to show Danny, “but this’ll be for you. The thread glows in the dark.”

The base was black, emblazoned with his symbol as Phantom in the centre. Stars dotted the background, varying in size from pinpricks of the same white thread as the central symbol to stars large enough that Jack had stitched in rays. Green ghosts—blobs, mostly; the sort that had been caught in jars in the lab once upon a time, the sort with which his father was most familiar from all his years of study—chased each other in an unfinished circle along the edge.

Danny knew how much work his father must have put into that. How much _love_ he’d put into that, picking out the thread colours—finding some that glowed in the dark—and talking over design plans with Maddie before deciding on one and stitching it out….

“It looks great.” It was subtle enough that someone who didn’t know his secret would assume he’d merely gotten his hands on some Phantom Phan merch. Not that he thought anyone who didn’t know his secret would find their way into his room. “It’ll look awesome with my model rockets.” He’d make room for it if there wasn’t. It didn’t matter if someone else might think it looked silly because it wasn’t silly _to him_. Besides, he was pretty sure he could hang it up in his school locker and even Dash wouldn’t tease him for it, since it was more likely Dash would try to just take it from him as forfeit for some imagined slight.

Danny knew what this was. It was Jack’s way of apologizing, of proving that he truly accepted Danny. Jack took his needlework seriously—all his crafting, really—as though each stitch had the same potential to blow up in his face as a loose screw on a weapon. Come to that, he might take it more seriously. His weapons were sometimes assembled in the haste of enthusiasm, but since he’d been doing these sorts of crafts for as long as Danny could remember (Bearbert was probably the only doll in the house that _hadn’t_ been made by Jack) in an effort to relax and calm down, he treated each stitch with a certain gravitas.

This time, he was trying to stitch closed the gap that had opened between them and widened under the weight of secrets.

This was a peace offering in a war they’d never really had once the truth had come out, but it was one that had always been right below the surface. It was one which Danny still thought about every day—the possibility that this might not be real, that the other shoe would drop and take everything with it, despite Jazz’s assurances.

Jack had noticed.

Clearly, now that his parents were paying attention, Danny couldn’t fool them at all, or at least not half as well as he’d thought he could. It didn’t matter that he didn’t excuse himself from a conversation at the earliest opportunity whenever the topic inevitably turned to ghosts. It didn’t matter that Phantom was regularly seen fighting ghosts alongside the Fentons. It didn’t matter that Danny had taught himself not to flinch when his parents pulled out and powered up their weapons.

They’d noticed his silence this time. They’d learned to listen to what he didn’t say. To read volumes in his stillness, the tension in his shoulders, the way he sometimes couldn’t quite meet their eyes.

“I love it,” Danny said, tracing the design with one hand before moving to give Jack a hug. “Thank you.”

Jack let out his breath in a burst—Danny hadn’t realized he’d been holding it—and wrapped his own arms around Danny, making an admirable attempt to crush his ribs.

Danny didn’t complain.

He’d missed this, too.


End file.
